A specialist in analytical metaphysics who became the most prominent advocate for sports in higher education, Brand is credited by his supporters with making unprecedented progress in pushing for academic reform.

Brand, 67, who died Wednesday after a battle with pancreatic cancer, was the first academic in a half-century to serve as president of the Indianapolis-based NCAA.

"He thrust presidents into an active role in the administration of college athletics," said Wayne Duke, retired commissioner of the Big Ten, who started at the NCAA in 1952. "It'll take someone of comparable dedication and skill to maintain that legacy."

NCAA Vice President David Berst said that although everyone knew Brand was gravely ill, the news Wednesday came as a surprise. Berst said he was awaiting e-mail responses from Brand.

"He had the ability to work with, and convince, (university) presidents to push their athletic communities toward academic reform," said Berst, a 37-year veteran of the NCAA. "I don't know anyone else who could have been as successful in those efforts."

Brand shepherded into the common parlance of the NCAA a system of academic accountability for teams called the Academic Progress Rate. He backed his belief in sports as an agent of broader social change by advocating for an NCAA policy against American Indian mascots.

Yet his pragmatic nature allowed for exceptions and compromise in both cases. As he often reminded people, the NCAA president has a bully pulpit, not the power of a czar.

Brand made the NCAA less rigid in applying the association's complicated rules to athlete eligibility cases.

Gov. Mitch Daniels issued a statement saying, "Myles was so full of good will and gentleness; we're so fortunate that IU made him a Hoosier and the NCAA kept him here with us."

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Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said Brand's accomplishments were "built on a strong foundation of values and courage that few enjoy."

Still, to many, Brand will be remembered primarily as the man who fired a controversial but beloved basketball coach -- and the winner of three national championships.

After years of tolerating Knight's aggressive behavior toward players and university staff, Brand announced a "zero tolerance" policy for the coach in May 2000.

Four months later, after Knight grabbed a student by the arm in anger, Brand fired him. Students protested outside his home, even burned him in effigy.

Kenneth Gros Louis, IU's chancellor at the time, said Brand was surprised by the "viciousness" of the response to Knight's firing.

"One could say he misread the fans of Bobby Knight," Gros Louis said. "I think that was one reason he left (for the NCAA) in the middle of an academic year. That was still lingering."

Firing Knight was the most famous act of Brand's time at IU, from 1994 to 2002. But he received high marks for initiatives in life sciences and information technology. The school's endowment quadrupled during his tenure.

Critics, however, cited the loss of top professors and a drop in the academic qualifications of freshmen.

Myles Neil Brand was born May 17, 1942. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of a draftsman and a housewife. He rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers and scorned their departure to Los Angeles decades after the fact.

Brand played briefly on the freshman basketball and lacrosse teams at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., but said he left to concentrate on academics.

He was the first in his family to graduate from college.

After receiving a doctorate in philosophy, Brand began a steady climb up the ladder of academia, with stops at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of Arizona.

In a story in the Portland Oregonian, Brand's son Josh recalled deep discussions his father and stepmother, Peg, also a philosophy professor, had at their dinner parties with other philosophy professors.

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Sometimes, Josh said, he would find his father sitting quietly in a room. "And I'd say, 'What are you doing, Dad?' And he'd say, 'Thinking,' " Josh Brand said. "And that's sort of what he did."

Brand, however, also built a career as a leader, serving as provost at Ohio State University before becoming president of the University of Oregon in 1989.

It was a difficult time for Brand, who had to make large budget cuts at the school because of a voter referendum that slashed taxes. In 1993, Brand was among three finalists to become president of the University of Wisconsin, but he withdrew after interviewing. A year later, he became president at IU.

It wasn't until firing Knight that Brand gained a reputation as a college sports reformer. He made a speech at the National Press Club in which he called on schools to "turn down the volume" of college sports.

Yet during his tenure as NCAA president, the industry grew ever larger. Brand defended a certain level of commercialism as necessary and acceptable but warned of rising expenses and questioned the propriety of coaches' contracts that reached up to $4 million a year.

Former IU Professor Murray Sperber, a noted critic of college sports, said he had much in common with Brand: "Jewish urban kids who got Ph.D.s . . . and became college professors."

Sperber said, "We had spirited arguments about college sports, and I could never convince him of my point of view, and he could never convince me of his."

In January, during the NCAA's annual convention, Brand released a statement saying he had pancreatic cancer.

In May, Brand's health prevented him from accepting in person an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame. A few weeks later, the school's president, the Rev. John Jenkins, presented Brand the degree in Indianapolis.

In a statement, Jenkins said, "He was a man for whom I had great respect -- as a scholar of the first rank, a gifted administrator, a reform-minded leader of the NCAA, and, most of all, as a man of great integrity."